Overview
Between October and April, roughly a third of the world’s Greenland white-fronted geese roost on the sand bars at the southern tip of the Raven. They spend the day feeding on the reclaimed farmland of the North Slob next door and pour back in around dusk. If you can only give the place an hour and you come in winter, time it for the last hour of daylight and watch that return – it is the single best thing here.
The rest of the year is quieter, and the draw is the walk: a flat, well-surfaced loop through pine woods planted on an old sand spit just north-east of Wexford town. The reserve covers about 589 hectares and carries every designation going – Ramsar wetland, Special Area of Conservation, Special Protection Area – but on the ground it is simply woods, dunes and a long shell-sand beach.
Getting there and parking
There is a free car park at the trail entrance, with a County Council car park nearby as overflow. Between them they hold around 50 cars, which is plenty except on a warm summer weekend, when the lot fills by late morning – come early or come midweek. There are no toilets and no drinking water anywhere in the reserve; the nearest public toilets are at the Curracloe beach car park, so go before you set out and bring your own water and snacks.
The walk
The main woodland circuit is 6.5 km on a compacted stone surface, flat and firm enough for wheelchairs, mobility scooters and buggies. Carry on past the forest edge, across the sand and along the shore, and the full loop comes to about 9 km; allow two to three hours for the whole thing. Sport Ireland grades it easy.
The trail opens under mature pines, soft and sheltered underfoot. As you near the coast the trees thin and the ground gives way to dunes and salt-marsh lagoons, and the path finally meets the wide shore of Curracloe. From there you can walk north along the beach to the car park or keep to the dune loop. Check tide times first: a high tide can briefly cut off the sand-bar crossing at the southern tip, and you then have to go the longer way round through the lower dunes.
Wildlife and rare plants
The birdlife is what makes the Raven internationally important. The wintering geese aside, large flocks of waders roost here year-round, little terns nest on the shell beaches at the south end, and crossbills work the pine cones overhead.
The woods are also a stronghold for native red squirrels, which do well on the pine seed the greys can’t use; the resident pine martens keep grey numbers down too. Under the dunes grows Ireland’s only population of round-leaved wintergreen, along with sand sedge and lesser centaury. In 2021 the ivy mining bee was recorded here for the first time in Ireland – a small thing, but the kind of detail that tells you how much this stretch of coast is doing.
A spit that stopped being a spit
The Raven began as a long, narrow sand spit sheltering the mouth of Wexford Harbour. In the mid-1880s the reclamation of the neighbouring North Slob for farmland closed off its western side and landlocked the dunes. The Toole family of nearby Curracloe House planted the first trees in the 1800s; when the State bought the land in 1930, the Parks & Wildlife Service began planting conifers in earnest – mostly Corsican pine, with Douglas fir, Scots and Monterey pine – to hold the sand against erosion. Native grey willow, burnet rose and sycamore have since crept back along the edges. The site became a national nature reserve in 1983 and a Ramsar wetland in 1986.
Know before you go
- Open all year. The reserve is unstaffed; there are no facilities on site.
- Dogs on leads at all times to protect ground-nesting birds.
- No fires, barbecues, camping, bikes or motor vehicles in the woods or on the beach.
- Winter and early spring are for the geese; late summer for warm beach weather and busy red squirrels.
The Raven pairs neatly with the nearby Wexford Wildfowl Reserve on the same stretch of the Slob, or with a wander round Wexford town afterwards.